The Apartment A Novel(43)

The front room was very brown. There were wooden chairs and wooden tables. All the tables were taken, and all the seats, and people who had arrived too late to get a seat were standing in the large space between the tables and the bar, which was long and narrow. Do you see them? I asked. Saskia squinted, scanned the tables in the front space, and said she didn’t. She took her phone out and telephoned Manuela. They spoke for a few seconds, and Saskia turned and looked toward the back of the building. I followed her line of sight and saw Manuela, on the phone, waving. The space at the back, where the old theatre must have been, had tall, tall ceilings, too tall, in fact, to see them from the front bar, and there was a haze of the sort you sometimes notice in big hangars, which has a hum to it – not the space itself, but in your ears when you look at it. We took our drinks and walked to where Manuela was. When you came out from the front space to the back, you got a real vertiginous shock. To the left, there were pool tables, all in a row, more than a dozen of them. To the right, in a far larger space, were lots and lots of picnic tables covered in oilcloth. We had to walk right through the middle of the crowd. The boys wore beards and moustaches, T-shirts and ragged sweaters, little hats and cool glasses, and I felt like they were looking at me with the same mix of shame and animosity they might show if their fathers had suddenly walked in. The girls didn’t seem to be looking at me. Manuela was with a large group crammed around a single large table. I guessed she thought Saskia and I were in love, because she bore an expression of that friendly pride you feel when someone you like has found happiness. I didn’t get the sense that Saskia went around thinking about love much, or pursuing it. I gathered, having heard the story about her father, that she would always suspect that love was a kind of repulsive, debilitating madness, that, far from being the source of ultimate happiness, it was extreme unhappiness masquerading as happiness, a temporary euphoria that felt wonderful for a little while, then killed you, like freezing to death. Of course that’s not the truth. I imagine that Mr and Mrs Pyz are in love. I imagine that love is everywhere. I imagined, in the big room through which we walked, that love was teeming, that it spilled out of the pupils and mouths and teeth and tongues of more than half the people there. I imagine that love is some people’s whole reason for wanting to live. We arrived at the table. Manuela said, I’m glad you came! Saskia said, We’ve walked the whole city, it seems. The others did not pay us too much attention. They glanced, but they said nothing. Janos gave me a nod. You went shopping, he said. New coat, I said. It’s nice, he said, but you look a little like Adolf Eichmann. I looked at myself. Janos hadn’t intended the remark as an insult. He really meant it. He was probably right. In a few years, I said, it’ll be dirty and threadbare. Janos shrugged. His friend said something to him, and he turned to speak with him, and forgot us. No one else made room so we could sit. There was not room to make, really. Every inch of the table’s perimeter was covered with arms and elbows, and scooting out was impossible, since every table was like that, and the space between tables was small. Maybe, at a stretch, they could have made room for two good friends, but I was a stranger, and whoever got stuck beside me would have to speak with me, in English, and come down from the bliss of effortless and pointless chit-chat.

Let’s play pool, said Saskia. But all the tables are full, I said. She said, We just put some money down and wait. Do you play pool? I asked. No, she said, but it’s better than standing. Manuela said, I’ll come along. And all the guys noticed this, because Manuela, simply by being so beautiful, legitimized them as a group. The three of us went over to a table where a bleary-eyed guy with a mullet and a wrestler’s moustache was standing unsteadily over a freshly racked set of balls, holding a bottle of beer. Saskia spoke to him, and he answered. What did he say? He said you look like a Nazi. I looked at Saskia and Manuela. Why didn’t you tell me I looked like a Nazi in this coat? You don’t, said Saskia, you look nice. Manuela said, If you’re not wearing a T-shirt, people in Chambinsky accuse you of looking like a Nazi, but if you left your coat on a chair, they’d probably steal it. Will he let us play? I asked. The guy said, in English, Play you for a tenner. For money? I said. Yes, he said, I will break. So we played him. It started out as me and Saskia versus him, but he was so bad, and so drunk, that I let Manuela and Saskia play him, and I just stood and drank my beer. At one point I think fifteen minutes passed without a single ball being potted. Why did you want to play for money? I asked the guy. Because I hate Nazis, he said. A little while after that, Janos came over with a friend and said, This is Zaid. He doesn’t believe you fought in Iraq. Hey, I said. I put out my hand for Zaid to shake it, and to my relief he shook it. Nice to meet you, I said. So is it true? he asked. It’s true, I said. Then I said to Janos that I thought I wasn’t supposed to say anything about it, and Janos said, But now we’ve been drinking. At that point, Manuela shrieked. She’d potted a ball. Zaid said, I’m a journalist. Newspaper? I asked. I write for a website, he said. I’m the editor. Well, I said, I don’t imagine I could tell you anything about Iraq you’d find interesting. I don’t either, he said, I just never met anyone who fought in a war. I’m not in the military any more, I said. Nevertheless, he said, in a way that made me think that when he spoke English he overused the word. I said, So, what do you think? I thought you’d have a bigger jaw, he said. Another one of Janos’s friends came over, and I suddenly felt it was a good idea to go have a cigarette outside. Saskia and Manuela still had a few balls on the table, and it did not appear that the guy with the mullet had hit one in yet, so I told them to make sure they got the money if they won while I was away. Saskia came close and said, Are they annoying you? Not a bit, I said. You’re not leaving? she said. Of course not, I said.